While hierarchy may provide an efficient solution to many organizational problems, it is by no means a universal panacea. In this third in final part of this series, I argue that alternative modes of coordination are both feasible and desirable in many, though not all, organizational contexts.

Technology: the good, the bad and the ugly

Technological improvements have tended to remove spatial barriers to communication. During most of human history, people had little mobility and could only communicate with a few people at a time. Starting with the printing press, communication technologies made it increasingly easy for people to share and receive information. This in turn facilitated large-scale deliberation and the diffusion of organizational power, as it became increasingly difficult for elites to monopolize the dissemination of knowledge. The advent of the Internet has now made it possible for a potentially unlimited number of people to meet and interact in a single place.

However, technology cannot entirely remove temporal barriers: while we may be able to communicate more efficiently and at a much wider scale than before, it is impossible to restrict discussion to a single point in time, considering that we need time to properly articulate our thoughts, and that dialogue necessarily requires that we take turns in speaking. Moreover, communication technologies have brought their share of negative side effects, such as the incredible quantity of noise and disinformation resulting from the easy access to communication tools.

Time, reconsidered

Our constant strife for efficiency has made us neglect the benefits of taking our time, as we constantly assume that “faster is better” and that “time is money”(see note). Unlike what many would think, slow non-hierarchical coordination often provides important side benefits.

First, participatory decision-making processes may be time-consuming, but they have the notable advantage of taking more information into consideration and can thus help avoid managerial “blind spots.”

Second, slow non-hierarchical governance can increase the motivation of participants: many people report having a feeling of empowerment when they are involved in a decision-making process which directly concerns them and in which they have an opportunity to contribute. However this can only happen if participants have the desire and the capacity to take on an active role.

The rise of hybrids

The rise of communication technologies has clearly opened the door to flatter (less hierarchical) kinds of organizations. Organization theorist Jon Husband associates the rise of technologically intensive and networked organizations with a new form of social organization which he names the wirearchy. This is the “technologically wired” organization, where people take full advantage of technology in order to perform activities through non-hierarchical social coordination.

Can today’s organizations become more like distributed networks?

Yet while many organizations have progressed toward non-hierarchical modes of coordination, nearly all organizations have maintained some form of authoritative decision-making mechanism. Corporations will always maintain at least two hierarchical levels, because their legal constitution makes managers subordinate to shareholders. But even outside the world of corporations, hierarchy persists because organizations inevitably end up facing efficiency, growth, and complexity-related problems.

As such there may be strong moral and practical arguments for moving toward less hierarchical organizations, but there are also strong practical arguments for maintaining some form of hierarchy. So what kind of organizational coordination should we aim for? Really, it depends on context. Unlike what many business gurus would say, there is no ideal form of management.

It is a fact that small businesses are particularly suited to cooperative arrangements, which in many cases make them even more flexible and resilient. However, small is not always better. Many organizations provide greater benefits to society when they are allowed to take advantage of large economies of scale – in other words, they ought to be big. A good example is the power utility: building a hydroelectric dam is both a capital intensive and complex task. It requires an organization capable of quickly coordinating a large number of highly specialized people. No such large organization has survived without having at least some form of hierarchical, top-down, authoritative coordination mechanism.

Nonetheless, even in such big organizations, there remains substantial room for managerial innovation. Not all responsibilities have to be defined in a hierarchical manner. Decision-making can be made more representative and better informed. The organization as a whole can be made more resilient to external shocks by encouraging workers to take local and collective initiatives. This simply cannot be achieved by confining people to squarely defined hierarchical roles.

As Jon Husband rightly points out, we should take advantage of the benefits that technology gives us in order to take up more responsibility, both individually and collectively.

Notes:

Jackson (2013) interestingly points out that “it is not naïve to ask ourselves what is the value of our time; and what is the quality of our experience in that time? When you begin to ask these questions you discover that time itself has some malleable qualities. It is not always a simple division between work and leisure, good and bad, pleasure and unpleasure: time itself is a slippery commodity. More things can happen in a very short space of time doing absolutely nothing, than can happen in a very full working day working as hard as you possibly can. Those kinds of questions enable us to think differently about time. And about productivity.” (Coote and Franklin, eds, 2013).

References:

Coote, Anna and Jane Franklin (eds.) (2013). TIme on our side: Why we all need a shorter working week. The New Economics Foundation.